Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
What's the tangible, money-in-the-bank benefit of a Facebook follower? Social marketing mavens have pondered the question for years and we're still not any closer to a hard answer. Facebook last month swept fake "Likes" from its pages, to the chagrin of spammers. But do efforts at gaming the social network even pay off? If you're using Facebook for legitimate marketing, what's the ROI of having virtual fans?
Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
Traditional wisdom—and online ad budgets—measure success in clicks. While that may work for ads on Google, Facebook says that focusing on the per-click return isn't the best method for businesses seeking to spread brand awareness. Per-click metrics don't show the "outcomes that happen in the grocery store, in the car dealership, or in the local coffee shop," said Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s director of pricing and measurement, as TechCrunch reported Monday.
Facebook lets advertisers play with test designs.
Instead, the real value lies in overall impressions, according to Smallwood. Reach and impressions have long formed the backbone of TV advertising, but online ads have tended to favor per-click metrics, a concrete way to know how many people saw an ad. Yet, click-throughs typically make up a tiny 5 percent or less of an ad's overall impression numbers.
Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
If you listen to conventional wisdom, LinkedIn is a vast sea of potential hires, all just waiting to jump onboard your company. The good news: LinkedIn indeed holds deep recruiting potential. The bad news: Rock star candidates won't start banging on your door just because you've whipped together a basic LinkedIn profile.
As with all recruiting efforts, mining LinkedIn for talent takes time and effort. Here's how your business can tap into the world’s largest professional network and find the right person for the right job.
Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
You may be more than the sum of your parts, but to Klout, you're just a number. The analytics company monitors your interactions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and beyond. It then sorts through the data to generate a numeric score that purportedly "measures a person’s overall online influence" on a scale from 1 to 100.
A tweak to Klout's algorithm in August was designed to improve accuracy, pulling in more variables and identifying "real world reach" with factors as Wikipedia mentions.
Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils. More by Brad Chacos
As social networks continue to grow, businesses are scrambling to grab customer attention and convert it to dollars. Some companies, however, aren't afraid to turn towards sleazier methods to amplify brand awareness. Gartner Research predicted today that 10 to 15 percent of all social media reviews by the end of 2014 will be fake critiques paid for by unscrupulous advertisers.
Gartner suggests that most of the paid-for reviews won't include disclosure about the reviewer's relationship with the reviewee, which could land both parties in legal hot water. In fact, the firm expects at least two Fortune 500 companies to come under fire by the FTC for attempting to game the social system over the next two years.
"Many marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions including additional hits on YouTube videos in order to pique site visitors' interests in the hope of increasing sales, customer loyalty and customer advocacy," said Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin, in a press release.
